/ 6 February 2003

SA sends Aziz Pahad to Iraq

South Africa on Thursday urged the United States to forward its report on Iraq to UN weapons inspectors in the country, and said it would send a senior government official to Baghdad in a bid to avert war.

”The government expresses its hope that this as well as any other information will be handed over to the UN weapons inspectors to facilitate their ongoing work in Iraq,” foreign ministry representative Ronnie Mamoepa said in a statement.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered a report to the Security Council on Wednesday in an attempt to prove that Iraq had lied to UN weapons inspectors.

In an 83-minute speech, supported by satellite photos and tapes of intercepted phone calls between military officers, Powell accused Iraq of ”concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.”

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party immediately dismissed the report as a fabrication to justify war.

ANC representative Smuts Ngonyama said desperation was forcing the United States to ”conjure up some fabrication” as justification for war, Business Day newspaper reported on Thursday.

”We should all refuse to be hoodwinked into believing this so-called new evidence. All peace-loving South Africans need to say they refuse to be hoodwinked into this unprecedented violent morass against the people of Iraq,” Ngonyama said.

South African President Thabo Mbeki has directed his deputy minister of foreign affairs, Aziz Pahad, to leave for Iraq on Friday. ”It is our historical duty, as the country that voluntarily dismantled its nuclear capacity, to get involved and get Iraqi disarmament without resorting to war,” Pahad said earlier this week.

In the early 1990s, former South Africa revealed that it had developed seven nuclear weapons, but dismantled them and invited the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) to conduct inspections.

Hans Blix, the UN’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq, was the director-general of the IAEA in 1993, when the agency sent inspectors to South Africa.

Last month, Blix praised what he called ”the South African model of co-operation,” and urged Iraq to adopt it.

The foreign ministry reaffirmed South Africa’s view that the United Nations was the only body fit to deal with the Iraqi crisis.

”The debate reaffirms South Africa’s view of the centrality of the United Nations in dealing with matters that impact on global peace and security as well as the necessity to maintain unity and cohesion in tackling challenges facing humanity,” Mamoepa said.

”The government again urges the Iraqi leadership to offer its full and pro-active co-operation with the UN weapons inspectors.”

Mbeki held a six-hour meeting with British Prime Minister Tony last week to voice his concern about Britain’s staunch support for a potential US-led war on Iraq.

Shortly before Powell’s submission, former South African President Nelson Mandela reiterated that the United Nations should be left to resolve the matter.

”(UN weapons inspection chief) Hans Blix and (head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog) Mohammed el-Baradei are men of integrity, and we want them to be respected. We are going to listen to them alone. We are not going to listen to the United States of America,” Mandela said at his Johannesburg home.

”What I’m condemning is that two countries should go out of the United Nations and have their own separate programme which actually undermines the United Nations.”

Last week, the 84-year-old statesman said the sole reason for a possible US-led attack on Iraq would be to gain control of its oil resources, adding that US President George Bush ”can’t think properly.” – Sapa-AFP